Why Realtime Worlds failed - an ex-dev's account

Luke Halliwell, a former employee of Realtime Worlds who was let go when they went into administration, has posted the first in a series of his attempts to explain the circumstances surrounding the company's catastrophe earlier this year.

In his blog post , he's steered clear of laying the blame on APB's design flaws , reasoning that in a company of around 300 people that managed to burn through $100 million, "the problems had to run deeper than [APB]."

He also cites an example of the kind of advanced bureaucracy that was probably at least partly responsible for the rough state of APB at launch. One quality assurance person took the time to trawl through the beta forums to find every possible bug mentioned by players, and they were told off because that was the remit of another department. That other department's job was just to assign a number between 1 and 100 to how positive the forums had been that week, not to collect bugs. So who was collecting bugs from the forums? It looks like everybody thought it was someone else's job, or was actively prevented from doing it because someone else thought it was someone else's job.